Obama's Stimulus Saved 450 Thousand Government Jobs But Lost 1 Million Private Sector Jobs

From "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled " by Timothy Conley, Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario, Canada and Bill Dupor, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, USA:

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to off set state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services. This suggests the possibility that, in absence of the ARRA, many government workers (on average relatively well-educated) would have found private-sector employment had their jobs not been saved. Searching across alternative model specifications, the best-case scenario for an effectual ARRA has the Act creating/saving a net 659 thousand jobs, mainly in government.

Read their complete paper here.

(HT: Greg Mankiw)